SALT LAKE CITY (Reuters) - Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard Fisher said on Friday China's growing role in the global economy presents challenges to the United States, but the U.S. economy has time to adjust.

"China's emergence will trigger changes to our economy, but they will not come so fast or big so big as to overwhelm us," Fisher said at an event sponsored by Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.

"We will have time to adjust," he said. "We have proven time and again that we thrive when we face up to the challenge of vigorous competition."

Fisher, who this year wields one of the rotating votes on the Fed's interest-rate setting panel, said it was increasingly important to look overseas to understand movements in inflation, interest rates and wages.

"A globalizing economy -- one increasingly opened to the movement of goods, services, people and ideas -- presents challenges to the conduct of monetary policy," he said, adding that it called into question familiar policy concepts and tools.

Fisher said globalization reduced the relevance of analyzes that tied inflationary pressures to slack in the domestic labor market, and he questioned the usefulness of traditional measures of industrial capacity utilization.

He did not, however, directly address the outlook for either the U.S. economy or interest rates.

"When it comes to the world economy, we as Americans need to sharpen our peripheral vision," the Dallas Fed chief said. "The more we know about the world, the better we can compete within it."

Fisher said that while the U.S. economy faced potential economic imbalances and needed to keep its house in order, "it would not be immodest for Americans to say the U.S. economy shines brightly."

In contrast, he said, China still lagged far behind by many economic and social metrics.